Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform) at Perplexity (San Francisco, CA)
Perplexity· San Francisco, CA· $220k–$405k·
Role details
Equity
Perplexity at a glance
AI-powered answer engine that returns real-time, cited answers, now expanding into an agentic browser and on-device agents.
Perplexity runs an AI answer engine that searches the live web and returns direct, cited answers instead of a page of links. It has extended that core into an AI browser (Comet), an on-device agent (Computer), a developer API, and vertical tools like patent search.
$1.7B raised · latest: Series E extension · $200M · 2025 (reported $20B valuation) · backed by Accel, IVP, NEA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Summary
Join the API Platform team to design, build, and scale mission-critical APIs and infrastructure. You will optimize performance, ensure security, and define technical strategy for high-traffic systems serving developers and agents.
Job description
Perplexity API Platform Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers. From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike. Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.
About this role
Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces. As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.
Why work at Perplexity
- Culture & Environment: “Thoughtful support” culture with emphasis on craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership. Hybrid schedule (4 days in-office) based on location.
- Perks: Daily catered meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner in office), office snacks, ride home program, commuter benefits, home office reimbursement, fitness classes, gym memberships.
- Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary and equity packages; retirement plans with company match; flexible PTO; holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year; 12 weeks paid bonding leave; comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Relocation & Visa Support: Relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship for eligible roles. Partners with immigration firm to support the process.
- Engineering Excellence: “Technical assessment for relevant roles”; values hands-on contribution, broad skill sets, and merit-based evaluation. Frequent Tech Talks and exposure to greenfield AI research problems.